the artist in front of “Tyrannosaurus” in Chiba prefecture (2016).
“Asura” in Akita prefecture (2015).
Toshihiko Hosaka began making sand sculptures in art school and has been using beaches and sand boxes as his canvas for almost 20 years. His work defies what we typically think of as sand art as he sculpts and carves the loose, granular substance as if it were some malleable form of clay.
There is no core, mold or adhesive ever used throughout the process: just sand. The only trick Hosaka uses (and this is commonly accepted) is a hardening spray applied to his sculpture only after it’s been completed, in order to prevent wind and sun from eroding it for a few days.
Looking at his work, you can hardly credit it, that’s it’s just sand, nothing more, because it’s truly amazing and intricate. He has done sculptures of Musashi Miyamoto, Godzilla, Alice in Wonderland, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Asura, and a massive Kraken, among others. All the ones listed you can see at Spoon & Tamago, and be sure to visit Toshihiko Hosaka’s website!
An octopus sings about overfishing:
Overfishing Song from “Papa Cloudy’s Restaurant” from Studio Creature on Vimeo.
Artist Chuck Miller is fascinated with bodies, as many artists are, however, what fascinates Miller the most is fluidity and complexity of flesh. You can read and see more at The Creators Project.
Milena Ogrizovic beside Monument of the Fallen Fighters. Designer: Dajana Vasic.
Throughout the former Yugoslavia, mysterious and beautiful monuments dot the landscape, initiated by Yugoslav revolutionary Josef Broz Tito and designed by modernist architects. Increasingly forgotten, these brutalist concrete sculptures, which were public monuments to the country’s fallen soldiers of World War II, are revived in Serbian photographer Jovana Mladenovic‘s series Monumental Fear, which not only explores the former country’s triumph over fascism, but echoes the painful split that led to several Balkan states. Mladenovic’s series is also a tone poem meant to celebrate the creativity of the Serbian people, many of them artists facing uncertainty in the wake of the Brexit vote.
After studying photography at Belgrade’s University of Arts, Mladenovic moved to London to pursue her interest in fashion photography at the London College of Fashion. But she soon realized she was more interested in conceptual art and photography. Though she was happy to be in London, exploring avant-garde impulses, Mladenovic started thinking about her home country—specifically, its brutalist Yugoslavian communist monuments unveiled in the decades following World War II.
Fascinating and beautiful work. You can read and see more at The Creators Project.
And last, but certainly not least, Mr. Rogers!
Mr. Rogers is singing about how it’s ok to hug a pillow or pine after a teddy bear, and even though it seems like I’m too old for such things, I feel my stomach drop and I’m suddenly having trouble breathing. I feel like a kid again, and thanks to the 18-day Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood marathon currently streaming on Twitch, over 2 million people have already had the chance to feel the same. The Twitch stream is playing the entire Mister Rogers archive back-to-back in chronological order, including rare episodes that only aired once on terrestrial TV.
Twitch reached out to PBS with an idea for a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood revival in the lead up to the show’s 50th anniversary. They launched the marathon on May 15, partially thanks to the overwhelming response to marathons of Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, and Julia Child’s The French Chef on the streaming platform. “We were excited to build on that momentum with this experimental initiative,” Lesli Rotenberg, a Senior Vice President at PBS, tells Creators.
You can read more about this at The Creators Project. The Twitch Mr. Roger’s Stream.
The monuments really resonate with me.
The sand sculptures are just plain awesome.
People have a tendency to hate a/o ignore anything Brutalist, but I found that series to be very poignant.
The sand sculptures, oh, complete awe here.
Brutalism, as with anything, must be done right: some of it is, to put it brutally, brutal on the eyes. It’s boxes and heavy lines and bad proportions, and it weighs a lot, visually speaking. When done right, you get sweeping magnificence that does, in a weird way, work with the environment around it -- while utterly dominating it. But if the emotion of the piece (and a lot of them encompass very large emotions, indeed) is visible, it makes all the difference. For me, personally, brutalism works better in monuments than buildings, due to that emotional freedom. For all its mass, brutalism has an element of futurism that makes me think of space and science fiction novels, though I think that’s more of an association by era (1960s, 1970s, though brutalism is older than that) than anything else.
I agree. It’s not easy to like Brutalist architecture, it’s often terribly dismal and cold. I find it much more attractive in monuments, where it tends to speak well, especially when the subject is a difficult one.
Lower-end brutalism is, quite literally, dismal and cold, esp. to work in. :D